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It would be really great to recreate loved ones after they have past in some sort of digital space. As I’ve gotten older, and my parents get older as well, I’v

It would be really great to recreate loved ones after they have past in some sort of digital space. As I’ve gotten older, and my parents get older as well, I’ve been thinking more about what my life will be like in old age (and beyond too). I’ve also been thinking what I would want “heaven” to be. Eternal life doesn’t appeal to me much. Imagine living a quadrillion years. Even as a god, that would be miserable. That would be (by my rough estimate) the equivalent of 500 times the cumulative lifespans of all humans who have ever lived. What I would really like is to see my parents and my beloved dog again, decades after they have past (along with any living ones at that time). Being able to see them and speak to them one last time at the end of my life before fading into eternal darkness would be how I would want to go. Anyway, there’s a free startup idea for anyone—recreate loved ones in VR so people can see them again.

heavyset_go 5y ago
I think it would be a special kind of hell to have your resurrected loved ones sell you ads in virtual reality.
rilezg 5y ago
This reminds me a lot of Black Mirror season 2 episode 1. Always good to treasure the time we are given.
- the_mar 5y ago
  and then you have to put your loved one's in the attic
- 1024core 5y ago
  I miss Black Mirror. Some episodes were hit-n-miss, but many of them made me think. The best part was that each episode was mostly independent of the other.
olladecarne 5y ago
There's so many things we invent with good intentions but in the end go terribly wrong and I think this is one of those things. I think it's ok to mourn and remember the past, but moving on and accepting reality is important to a healthy life. Let's be real though, the startup that makes this but appeals to our worst instincts make bank. I can't imagine how much more messed up future generations will be as we keep making more dangerous technology that appeals to our primal instincts.
- ineedasername 5y ago
  "mourn and move on" is a somewhat Western concept of dealing with death. Plenty of cultures around the world have developed different practices, up to religious forms of ancestor worship.
  - nimbleal 5y ago
    These practices would typically be associated with the idea that the dead have a genuine existence beyond simply “existing in my memory of them” and would be restricted in the forms they take by surrounding ritual, so I’m not sure there’s a direct point of comparison, though?
    - pizza 5y ago
      People often fear losing their memory of a loved one. A memento could help someone heal
    - ineedasername 5y ago
      Yes, there's a direct comparison. Practices change as times and technology change. When photography became cheap enough, practices like in-home shrines often changed to incorporate photographs of loved ones. I think it's reasonable to speculate that newer forms digital representation can become part of these practices as well.
  - acdanger 5y ago
    Possible the comment was directed towards a Western consumer.
    - ineedasername 5y ago
      Possibly, I'd give it the benefit of the doubt. Either way, I think it is fair to note that other cultures see death & remembrance in different ways.
      - 5y ago
lowdest 5y ago
>Imagine living a quadrillion years. Even as a god, that would be miserable. This seems very subjective, I don't agree at all.
- the_af 5y ago
  Agreed it's subjective. That said, what would you do with your quadrillion year long lifespan, assuming you're healthy during it? It's way past everything you can do and learn, and cosmic level events are not what the human mind can perceive as they slowly unfold... I would like to live a couple thousand years though, as long as my loved ones get to be along for the ride. Though I wonder if my loved ones would eventually become my hated ones...
  - p1esk 5y ago
    It seems like you assume you would remain human for a quadrillion years. Why? I'd assume a technology to upload yourself into a better substrate (one you have full control over) will appear within next few hundred years. From that point there are no limits on what you can do or become.
    - the_af 5y ago
      Your answer is the only valid counterpoint, in my opinion. Since the human mind cannot perceive the passage of quadrillion years, we would have to become something else, something inhuman. I don't know whether this is something I would wish for myself. Maybe. I like being human. But maybe, who knows?
      - p1esk 5y ago
        What do you like about being human?
  - lowdest 5y ago
    I'm fond of my loved ones, but I also like creating new ones. I also would like to see very long term plans come to fruition. It seems very much like a "640K ought to be enough for anybody" problem. Works of art that require thousands of lifetimes to complete. Deep understanding of the physical world. Exploring the universe. Much more.
chrstphrknwtn 5y ago
My gut reaction to 'recreating loved ones in VR' is that it would be torturous more than soothing. Once a person dies, they're gone. The world is different, and nothing will bring them back. Spending time with a simulacrum isn't really spending time with a loved one.
- dijonman2 5y ago
  It has the potential to be therapeutic. Perhaps only to be used under the supervision of a mental health professional. I for one have many things I wish I had said to my parents before they died. I’d like to use it, but not be obsessed or consumed by it.
- spacexsucks 5y ago
  Precisely. This is going to be used to suck people into the metaverse.
- Jach 5y ago
  Don't knock it til you try it? I mean, already in recent years people have made some very low fidelity 'resurrections' and gotten some measure of comfort from it, never mind the many years of history of people who visit gravestones to 'chat' (some even believing they get replies to some extent or another). When markov chains were hip, "talk with Charles Dickens!" (play with a markov model trained on his works) was at least interesting to some, GPT of course can do a lot better. Imagine we had actual superintelligent AI working on this, which actually tried to recreate brain models, or even restore a sense of existence to the resurrection that can continue independently and to their own delight rather than just being some static VR experience turned on and off whenever. (I jotted some thoughts a few years ago... https://www.thejach.com/view/2017/6/how_you_might_see_some_of_the_dead_again https://www.thejach.com/view/2017/6/how_you_might_see_some_o...) I'm in agreement though at least for now that even if you dialed up the fidelity to the point I can't point to anything objectively "off", let alone went with a low fidelity VR thing or just a chat bot, I'd still always think in the back of my mind that this isn't really the same person. Nevertheless, it could still be comforting to some, and interesting to others, and so if it's at all possible for potential future humans/ems/aligned AIs to work at it, they will. Curiously I don't have the same back of the mind feeling at all when considering the idea of someone preserved with cryonics and then brought back as an em, the person would be the same to me, even if there was a bit of damage from the vitrification process that was error-corrected. I have a disagreement with a friend on that point, who thinks it would be something similar but not the same. Anyway, I think this is due to just having a much higher fidelity "source of truth" to work from that is the preserved adult brain, whereas someone supposedly information-theoretically dead requires a lot more guess-work, perhaps truly impossibly too much more even for a superintelligence, to bring back convincingly.
celim307 5y ago
Isn’t that the premise of the Amazon series upload
tonguez 5y ago
“I’ve also been thinking what I would want “heaven” to be. Eternal life doesn’t appeal to me much.” please tell me more!
airstrike 5y ago
Hah! I made this suggestion here about a couple years ago. It's been my dream-pet-project-I'll-never-create for a while now, but it seems like more talented and predisposed individuals have also considered it / may be working on it already... Some interesting replies there https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24073994 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24073994
pvarangot 5y ago
If that technology existed a lot of people would live in misery knowing that they could be seeing their dog and their parents and speak to them one last time, but only when their time to goes come. Either that or people would be able to use it whenever they wanted or could pay for it and it would become a new highly addictive and harmfully dissociative tech product that I venture to guess would be like 10x more harmful to society than Facebook ever was. I don't even know if it would have some kind of therapeutic use of whatever. Yeah ir would be a wonderful experience and I... ehh... let's say "dreamed" about similar experiences a few times and it was a powerful "dream". But being able to do it on demand would I think change how grieving works in the modern world so much! And we rely on the things that went to not actually be there for us on demand to be able to move on. It's a beautiful idea but it's as beautiful as the fear of nuclear MAD keeping the first world safe from war in their own land, not as beautiful as a poem or a flower or a good memory.
CamperBob2 5y ago
You'd probably like Spielberg's A.I., or at least find it topical.
TaylorAlexander 5y ago
what's fun is my mom has a bunch of 3D photo slides from the 1950's and 1960's so we could bring those in to stereo VR really easily. I still need to borrow my friend's slide scanner...
archivisti 5y ago
You mean Westworld ?
- xsmasher 5y ago
  More like "Things to do in Denver when you're dead."
mfrye0 5y ago
Upload is a pretty good series on Amazon Prime right now that explores that. It's both amazing and horrifying.
- ClosedPistachio 5y ago
  You may also enjoy Marjorie Prime, too https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marjorie_Prime https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marjorie_Prime
picodguyo 5y ago
I'm with you on this. I would love to be able to connect with ancestors I barely or never met, even if it only captures a fraction of their essence. I worked on this for a while but Microsoft holds a pretty broad patent on this concept, which scared me off.
sgtnoodle 5y ago
I suppose I'm less pessimistic. I assume that eternal life wouldn't be the same experience as the corporeal passage of time. Time would exist of course, but would be perceived either as its true essence, or at least as a higher dimensional projection. Rather than be anchored in time at a constant velocity, you would be able to move and exist independently from it.
bobthechef 5y ago
> Eternal life doesn’t appeal to me much. Imagine living a quadrillion years. Even as a god, that would be miserable. That isn't necessarily what eternal life would be. Indeed, eternity is not temporal at all. For example, in the Catholic understanding of heaven, those in heaven exist in aeveternity or aevum[0], a state in between the temporal and the eternal. Eternity[1] is proper only to God and is by definition timeless, with no beginning or end, so it would not make sense to speak of quadrillions of years. Where God is concerned, there is, loosely, only a now with no beginning, no end, no past, and no future, only the present, to use temporal language analogically. Furthermore, heaven is in part characterized by the beatific vision[2] which is an immediate, direct, and inexhaustible knowing of God (Being Himself) which is Man's ultimate and supreme happiness. In this life, knowledge of God is generally mediate like much of human knowledge. In other words, thus understood, the best of this life is but a faint shadow of a shadow in comparison to the ultimate fulfillment of heaven which is Man's proper end. [0] https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1010.htm#article5 https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1010.htm#article5 [1] https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05551b.htm https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05551b.htm [2] https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02364a.htm https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02364a.htm
- eyelidlessness 5y ago
  This in no way represents my views, it's far from them. But I vouched for this comment because it deserves to be a part of this conversation.
JKCalhoun 5y ago
Sounds like the end of the movie: "A.I.".
Razengan 5y ago
> It would be really great to recreate loved ones after they have passed That’s probably the basis for most of human religion and philosophy; coping mechanisms. I’ve always wondered if it might be possible to ”reverse engineer” parents or siblings from one’s own DNA.. at least visually.
robertlagrant 5y ago
I can imagine people would also create their exes and talk to them after they've broken up.
hasvoh 5y ago
[dead]
selcuka 5y ago
We are not too far away from that [1]. [1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2021/jessica-simulation-artificial-intelligence/ https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2021/jessica-simulation...
bglazer 5y ago
“Mom do you remember the walk we took around the lake just before you died?” “Yes what a wonderful day. I also fondly remember the Adidas sneakers I wore. Did you know they’re 25% off at Target this weekend only?”
wilg 5y ago
> It would be really great to recreate loved ones after they have past in some sort of digital space. Tim Heidecker did this with his son Tom Cruise, Jr. Heidecker and it was quite moving: https://youtu.be/2fVQtmMN_ao?t=178 https://youtu.be/2fVQtmMN_ao?t=178

heavyset_go 5y ago

I think it would be a special kind of hell to have your resurrected loved ones sell you ads in virtual reality.

rilezg 5y ago

This reminds me a lot of Black Mirror season 2 episode 1. Always good to treasure the time we are given.

the_mar 5y ago
and then you have to put your loved one's in the attic
1024core 5y ago
I miss Black Mirror. Some episodes were hit-n-miss, but many of them made me think. The best part was that each episode was mostly independent of the other.

olladecarne 5y ago

There's so many things we invent with good intentions but in the end go terribly wrong and I think this is one of those things. I think it's ok to mourn and remember the past, but moving on and accepting reality is important to a healthy life. Let's be real though, the startup that makes this but appeals to our worst instincts make bank. I can't imagine how much more messed up future generations will be as we keep making more dangerous technology that appeals to our primal instincts.

ineedasername 5y ago
"mourn and move on" is a somewhat Western concept of dealing with death. Plenty of cultures around the world have developed different practices, up to religious forms of ancestor worship.
- nimbleal 5y ago
  These practices would typically be associated with the idea that the dead have a genuine existence beyond simply “existing in my memory of them” and would be restricted in the forms they take by surrounding ritual, so I’m not sure there’s a direct point of comparison, though?
  - pizza 5y ago
    People often fear losing their memory of a loved one. A memento could help someone heal
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    Yes, there's a direct comparison. Practices change as times and technology change. When photography became cheap enough, practices like in-home shrines often changed to incorporate photographs of loved ones. I think it's reasonable to speculate that newer forms digital representation can become part of these practices as well.
- acdanger 5y ago
  Possible the comment was directed towards a Western consumer.
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    Possibly, I'd give it the benefit of the doubt. Either way, I think it is fair to note that other cultures see death & remembrance in different ways.
    - 5y ago

lowdest 5y ago

>Imagine living a quadrillion years. Even as a god, that would be miserable. This seems very subjective, I don't agree at all.

the_af 5y ago
Agreed it's subjective. That said, what would you do with your quadrillion year long lifespan, assuming you're healthy during it? It's way past everything you can do and learn, and cosmic level events are not what the human mind can perceive as they slowly unfold... I would like to live a couple thousand years though, as long as my loved ones get to be along for the ride. Though I wonder if my loved ones would eventually become my hated ones...
- p1esk 5y ago
  It seems like you assume you would remain human for a quadrillion years. Why? I'd assume a technology to upload yourself into a better substrate (one you have full control over) will appear within next few hundred years. From that point there are no limits on what you can do or become.
  - the_af 5y ago
    Your answer is the only valid counterpoint, in my opinion. Since the human mind cannot perceive the passage of quadrillion years, we would have to become something else, something inhuman. I don't know whether this is something I would wish for myself. Maybe. I like being human. But maybe, who knows?
    - p1esk 5y ago
      What do you like about being human?
- lowdest 5y ago
  I'm fond of my loved ones, but I also like creating new ones. I also would like to see very long term plans come to fruition. It seems very much like a "640K ought to be enough for anybody" problem. Works of art that require thousands of lifetimes to complete. Deep understanding of the physical world. Exploring the universe. Much more.

chrstphrknwtn 5y ago

My gut reaction to 'recreating loved ones in VR' is that it would be torturous more than soothing. Once a person dies, they're gone. The world is different, and nothing will bring them back. Spending time with a simulacrum isn't really spending time with a loved one.

dijonman2 5y ago
It has the potential to be therapeutic. Perhaps only to be used under the supervision of a mental health professional. I for one have many things I wish I had said to my parents before they died. I’d like to use it, but not be obsessed or consumed by it.
spacexsucks 5y ago
Precisely. This is going to be used to suck people into the metaverse.
Jach 5y ago
Don't knock it til you try it? I mean, already in recent years people have made some very low fidelity 'resurrections' and gotten some measure of comfort from it, never mind the many years of history of people who visit gravestones to 'chat' (some even believing they get replies to some extent or another). When markov chains were hip, "talk with Charles Dickens!" (play with a markov model trained on his works) was at least interesting to some, GPT of course can do a lot better. Imagine we had actual superintelligent AI working on this, which actually tried to recreate brain models, or even restore a sense of existence to the resurrection that can continue independently and to their own delight rather than just being some static VR experience turned on and off whenever. (I jotted some thoughts a few years ago... https://www.thejach.com/view/2017/6/how_you_might_see_some_of_the_dead_again https://www.thejach.com/view/2017/6/how_you_might_see_some_o...) I'm in agreement though at least for now that even if you dialed up the fidelity to the point I can't point to anything objectively "off", let alone went with a low fidelity VR thing or just a chat bot, I'd still always think in the back of my mind that this isn't really the same person. Nevertheless, it could still be comforting to some, and interesting to others, and so if it's at all possible for potential future humans/ems/aligned AIs to work at it, they will. Curiously I don't have the same back of the mind feeling at all when considering the idea of someone preserved with cryonics and then brought back as an em, the person would be the same to me, even if there was a bit of damage from the vitrification process that was error-corrected. I have a disagreement with a friend on that point, who thinks it would be something similar but not the same. Anyway, I think this is due to just having a much higher fidelity "source of truth" to work from that is the preserved adult brain, whereas someone supposedly information-theoretically dead requires a lot more guess-work, perhaps truly impossibly too much more even for a superintelligence, to bring back convincingly.

celim307 5y ago

Isn’t that the premise of the Amazon series upload

tonguez 5y ago

“I’ve also been thinking what I would want “heaven” to be. Eternal life doesn’t appeal to me much.” please tell me more!

airstrike 5y ago

Hah! I made this suggestion here about a couple years ago. It's been my dream-pet-project-I'll-never-create for a while now, but it seems like more talented and predisposed individuals have also considered it / may be working on it already... Some interesting replies there https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24073994 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24073994

pvarangot 5y ago

If that technology existed a lot of people would live in misery knowing that they could be seeing their dog and their parents and speak to them one last time, but only when their time to goes come. Either that or people would be able to use it whenever they wanted or could pay for it and it would become a new highly addictive and harmfully dissociative tech product that I venture to guess would be like 10x more harmful to society than Facebook ever was. I don't even know if it would have some kind of therapeutic use of whatever. Yeah ir would be a wonderful experience and I... ehh... let's say "dreamed" about similar experiences a few times and it was a powerful "dream". But being able to do it on demand would I think change how grieving works in the modern world so much! And we rely on the things that went to not actually be there for us on demand to be able to move on. It's a beautiful idea but it's as beautiful as the fear of nuclear MAD keeping the first world safe from war in their own land, not as beautiful as a poem or a flower or a good memory.

CamperBob2 5y ago

You'd probably like Spielberg's A.I., or at least find it topical.

TaylorAlexander 5y ago

what's fun is my mom has a bunch of 3D photo slides from the 1950's and 1960's so we could bring those in to stereo VR really easily. I still need to borrow my friend's slide scanner...

archivisti 5y ago

You mean Westworld ?

xsmasher 5y ago
More like "Things to do in Denver when you're dead."

mfrye0 5y ago

Upload is a pretty good series on Amazon Prime right now that explores that. It's both amazing and horrifying.

ClosedPistachio 5y ago
You may also enjoy Marjorie Prime, too https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marjorie_Prime https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marjorie_Prime

picodguyo 5y ago

I'm with you on this. I would love to be able to connect with ancestors I barely or never met, even if it only captures a fraction of their essence. I worked on this for a while but Microsoft holds a pretty broad patent on this concept, which scared me off.

sgtnoodle 5y ago

I suppose I'm less pessimistic. I assume that eternal life wouldn't be the same experience as the corporeal passage of time. Time would exist of course, but would be perceived either as its true essence, or at least as a higher dimensional projection. Rather than be anchored in time at a constant velocity, you would be able to move and exist independently from it.

bobthechef 5y ago

> Eternal life doesn’t appeal to me much. Imagine living a quadrillion years. Even as a god, that would be miserable. That isn't necessarily what eternal life would be. Indeed, eternity is not temporal at all. For example, in the Catholic understanding of heaven, those in heaven exist in aeveternity or aevum[0], a state in between the temporal and the eternal. Eternity[1] is proper only to God and is by definition timeless, with no beginning or end, so it would not make sense to speak of quadrillions of years. Where God is concerned, there is, loosely, only a now with no beginning, no end, no past, and no future, only the present, to use temporal language analogically. Furthermore, heaven is in part characterized by the beatific vision[2] which is an immediate, direct, and inexhaustible knowing of God (Being Himself) which is Man's ultimate and supreme happiness. In this life, knowledge of God is generally mediate like much of human knowledge. In other words, thus understood, the best of this life is but a faint shadow of a shadow in comparison to the ultimate fulfillment of heaven which is Man's proper end. [0] https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1010.htm#article5 https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1010.htm#article5 [1] https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05551b.htm https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05551b.htm [2] https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02364a.htm https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02364a.htm

eyelidlessness 5y ago
This in no way represents my views, it's far from them. But I vouched for this comment because it deserves to be a part of this conversation.

JKCalhoun 5y ago

Sounds like the end of the movie: "A.I.".

Razengan 5y ago

> It would be really great to recreate loved ones after they have passed That’s probably the basis for most of human religion and philosophy; coping mechanisms. I’ve always wondered if it might be possible to ”reverse engineer” parents or siblings from one’s own DNA.. at least visually.

robertlagrant 5y ago

I can imagine people would also create their exes and talk to them after they've broken up.

hasvoh 5y ago

[dead]

selcuka 5y ago

We are not too far away from that [1]. [1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2021/jessica-simulation-artificial-intelligence/ https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2021/jessica-simulation...

bglazer 5y ago

“Mom do you remember the walk we took around the lake just before you died?” “Yes what a wonderful day. I also fondly remember the Adidas sneakers I wore. Did you know they’re 25% off at Target this weekend only?”

wilg 5y ago

> It would be really great to recreate loved ones after they have past in some sort of digital space. Tim Heidecker did this with his son Tom Cruise, Jr. Heidecker and it was quite moving: https://youtu.be/2fVQtmMN_ao?t=178 https://youtu.be/2fVQtmMN_ao?t=178